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Corynne McSherry

Corynne McSherry is the Legal Director at EFF, specializing in intellectual property, open access, and free speech issues. Her favorite cases involve defending online fair use, political expression, and the public domain against the assault of copyright maximalists. As a litigator, she has represented Professor Lawrence Lessig, Public.Resource.Org, the Yes Men, and a dancing baby, among others, and one of her first cases at EFF was In re Sony BMG CD Technologies Litigation (aka the "rootkit" case). In 2015 she was named one of California's Top Entertainment Lawyers. She was also named AmLaw's "Litigator of the Week" for her work on Lenz v. Universal. Her policy work includes leading EFF’s effort to fix copyright (including the successful effort to shut down the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA), promote net neutrality, and promote best practices for online expression. In 2014, she testified before Congress about problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Corynne comments regularly on digital rights issues and has been quoted in a variety of outlets, including NPR, CBS News, Fox News, the New York Times, Billboard, the Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone. Prior to joining EFF, Corynne was a civil litigator at the law firm of Bingham McCutchen, LLP. Corynne has a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, a Ph.D from the University of California at San Diego, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. While in law school, Corynne published Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001).

The closing months of 2009 saw the beginning of an unfortunate legal dispute in which a trademark owner, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ran to court to punish political activists for using its marks in a political parody. Sadly, less than a week into 2010, another trademark owner, Peabody Energy, is also using legal threats to attempt to silence criticism.

UPDATE (9/4/14): The net neutrality landscape has changed in the last few years, and not for the better. Here's a discussion about EFF's updated stance and here's our issue page, with links to our most recent blog posts.

In a few weeks, tens of thousands of creative people will make their yearly pilgrimage to Nevada’s Black Rock desert for Burning Man, an annual art event and temporary community celebrating radical self expression, self-reliance, creativity and freedom. Most have the entirely reasonable expectation that they will own and control what is likely the largest number of creative works generated on the Playa: the photos they take to document their creations and experiences.

Last month, EFF got an email from software developer Duane Fields of Exact Magic, asking if he could use our logo on an iPhone application that exclusively displays content from EFF's RSS feed. Sounded like a great idea to us, as long as it was clear that the app wasn't an EFF-sponsored product.

Here’s a story we hear a lot at EFF: You think BadCo, Inc. is a bad actor and you’ve developed a really cool site to tell the world why. Maybe just by griping about them or maybe through a bit of parody. Fast forward two weeks: you’re basking in the pleasure of calling BadCo out when bam! You find out your site’s been shut down. You call your internet service provider to find out what’s going on.

Opening shots were fired Friday in the RealNetworks v. DVD-CCA case. Unfortunately, the public was excluded from key parts of the battle, when the presiding judge, Marilyn Hall Patel, granted DVD-CCA's request to close the courtroom.